Writing good software Part I

Now that I am starting to wrap my head around everything a little better I thought I would re visit a favorite book. Object Oriented Analysis & Design is a book in the head first series by O'Reilly. I have not read this book in a long time and even when I did I don't think I really understand it. Know that I want to learn more about the actual architecture side of things I thought I would dive back into it. What a better way to dive through it then to share everything with the 5 of you who read this blog ;)

Writing great software is not easy, if it was easier everyone would be doing it. There is more work involved in creating great software and for some the task in hand does not involve the future. The first thing we need to go over is modeling our application. A visual model is usually represented using UML. There are plenty of resources out there on UML but  I will quickly run down the basics.

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OOP Concepts Applied In CFML: Abstraction

One of the most fundamental concepts you will need to grasp is Abstraction. Let's take a look at the Wikipedia definition and we can break it down from there.

In computer science, abstraction is a mechanism and practice to reduce and factor out details so that one can focus on a few concepts at a time. The following English definition of abstraction helps to understand how this term applies to Computer Science, IT and Objects - i.e. abstraction is: A concept or idea not associated with any specific instance

Like everything else in life people really like to complicate things to stand above the rest. When developers speak of OO you will often hear Encapsulation and Abstraction. At first it may sound complicated but if you look at the definition, it really is not.

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OOP state of mind In the land of CFML

A little background on me before I get into which may turn out to be a heated discussion but that's how we learn. I started out doing basic html web sites like most of you. I then found myself in a 2 year technical college learning a variety of languages such as Basic,C,C++ & Java. Now I truly never became skilled in all languages it prepared me for the future. I then started programming using ColdFusion and even to this day people say that does not classify me as a "real" programmer. I would of course disagree with you and say that language aside the very ideas of programming can be used across every language out there.

Now that we got that out of the way we can talk a little about Object Oriented Programming. I started picking up Action Script 3 about a year ago and absolutely love the language. While I am a ColdFusion addict (cfaddict) I am really loving the full OO structure of AS3. ColdFusion 8 is not a full OO language but it clearly exceeds it predecessors in giving you more ways to think OO.

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